The four-word homepage test

Here is the cheapest usability test in the world. It costs one stranger and five seconds.

Show someone your homepage. Take it away after five seconds. Ask: "What do they do?" If the answer comes back in four words or fewer — "they fix cars, Amsterdam", "wedding photos, expensive", "cleaning, offices" — you pass. If it comes back as "something with… solutions?", you have a problem no amount of design will fix.

We run this on every site before launch and on most sites people send us. Most fail. Not because the businesses are unclear — the owners can tell you in four words in the pub — but because somewhere between the pub and the homepage, the words got dressed up.

Where the four words go missing

• The welcome. "Welcome to our website" tells the visitor they have arrived. They know. It is the only sentence on the page they will definitely read, and it says nothing.
• The abstraction. "Solutions", "services", "quality", "passion". Words that mean everything mean nothing. A garage does not provide automotive solutions. It fixes cars.
• The photo doing the talking. A picture of a handshake, a skyline or a smiling stock model is not a description of anything. A photo of the workshop, the kitchen, the product — that helps.
• The slider. Five headlines rotating means no headline. The visitor sees the second half of one and the first half of another.

How to pass

Write the four words first. What you do, and for whom or where. Then build the sentence around them, then the page around the sentence.

"Car repair in Amsterdam-Noord. Honest prices, same-week appointments." That is a homepage. Everything else on it — the reviews, the opening hours, the button — supports those two lines.

The follow-up question

Once they know what you do, ask the stranger: "What would you tap?" If they hesitate, there is no clear next step, or there are five. One primary action per page. The rest can exist, quieter.

Five seconds, one stranger, two questions. Do it before you spend a euro on a redesign. Half the time it saves you the redesign. The other half, it tells you exactly what the redesign is for.